Before the list, the inconvenient finding. The largest recent meta-analysis of watching video in a second language pooled 75 effect sizes from 56 experiments and found that entertainment video - TV series and films - produced lower gains than educational video like documentaries and talks.1
So the honest version of this article is that a documentary would teach you more per hour. Nobody watches documentaries four nights running. Hence the list below.
What actually makes a Mexican show hard
Not vocabulary. Four other things, and they stack.
| Factor | What it does to you |
|---|---|
| Syllable rate | Spanish delivers a lot of syllables per second, each carrying relatively little information, so more sound arrives per second than your English-trained ear expects |
| Register | Office Spanish is learnable. Locker-room Spanish, with the insult grammar underneath it, is a different language |
| Overlap | Two people talking at once is normal in Mexican dialogue writing and fatal for a learner |
| Accent range | A cast from Coahuila, Mexico City and Bogotá in one scene is three listening tasks |
The syllable rate is why you can read a page of Spanish comfortably and then lose half a sentence out loud. Researchers comparing seven languages described Spanish as a fast rate of low-information syllables, against Mandarin’s slower rate of denser ones - and found the two ended up transmitting information at almost the same speed.2 So the message reaches you at a perfectly normal pace. It just arrives inside a lot more sound, and the sound is the part you have to keep up with live.
A throwaway line like ya mero llegamos, no te agüites is five words on the page and about a second in the air, and none of the five will be said fully.
We have a whole piece on why that feels so fast in Mexico specifically.
The ladder
Three tiers. Move up when the current one stops costing you anything.
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tier one Roma · La Casa de las Flores · Luis Miguel: La Serie Slow, clear, and guessable from the picture Roma is set in Mexico City in 1970 and 1971 and moves at the speed of a household. La Casa de las Flores is a family melodrama with stage-clear diction and a plot you can follow with the sound down. Luis Miguel is broadcast Spanish about a life you already half know.
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tier two Club de Cuervos · Nosotros los Nobles · Control Z Normal speed, real slang, class on the surface Club de Cuervos is a football-club comedy that lives half in boardrooms and half in dressing rooms, so the register swings hard inside a single episode. Nosotros los Nobles is a film about rich kids forced to take jobs. Control Z is teenagers, which means the slang is current and the delivery is fast.
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tier three Diablero · Somos. · Narcos: México Street register, regional speech, overlapping lines Diablero is Mexico City street Spanish at full speed with no concessions. Somos. is northern, quiet and full of people talking over each other. Narcos: México is the trap - the accents are from several countries and a good deal of it is in English.
Tier two is the one that matters. Both of its Mexican comedies are landmarks at home. Club de Cuervos was Netflix’s first Spanish-language original series, announced as launching in every Netflix territory at once in August 2015.3 Nosotros los Nobles, two years earlier, took the Mexican box-office record on release, and has been passed since.4
Both run on class, and class in Mexico is carried by two words above all others - the same two an entire generation of Mexican comedy is built on: fresa and naco. If you have never had those two explained, half the jokes will land as noise. There is a piece on exactly that pair.
The one film everybody recommends, and the thing nobody mentions about it
Roma is the standard first recommendation, and it deserves it. But it is not only in Spanish. Cleo and Adela speak Mixtec to each other, and Cuarón has said that was deliberate - a language the two of them use in private, in the kitchen and the bedroom, not in front of the family.5
So some of the dialogue you cannot follow is not your Spanish failing - it is Mixtec, spoken by design, in a film about who gets to be heard inside a house. Knowing that in advance saves you an hour of thinking your ear has collapsed.
Subtitles: the only setting worth arguing about
Do this
- Spanish audio, Spanish subtitles - a meta-analysis of ten comparisons found a large advantage over none
- One episode with subtitles, the same episode again without
- Pause on a line you half caught, not on every unknown word
- Move up a tier the moment it stops being uncomfortable
Not this
- English subtitles, which quietly become the thing you are reading
- No subtitles at all before you can follow the gist
- A dubbed foreign show, where the Spanish text and the Spanish audio were written by different people
- Leaving it on while you cook, which the research measures as nothing
The captioned-video finding is solid: pooling ten studies that compared watching with same-language captions against watching without, researchers found a large effect on both listening comprehension and vocabulary.6 Ten seconds in a settings menu, and it is the biggest single change in this article.
What a show cannot give you
Scripted dialogue is written to be understood. Real Mexican conversation is not: it trails off, it repairs itself, it leaves the verb out because both people already know it, it drops a pues or an o sea into the middle of a clause, and it fills the gaps with no manches and güey in positions no screenwriter would put them.
That is the honest limit of the whole exercise, and it lines up with the meta-analysis finding at the top. Scripted entertainment is the input you will actually keep coming back to. Efficiency is a separate question. Use it to get your ear used to the speed, then get the rest from people. If you want the method rather than the titles, there is a piece on how to work a single clip properly.
Watch four minutes with your eyes closed. If you can still say what happened, the show is below your level and you are reading it rather than hearing it. Move up.
Streaming catalogs move, and a title you can watch in one country this month may be gone from it by the next. The ladder is about how these nine sound, not where they currently sit.
Sources
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The effects of audiovisual input on second language learning: A meta-analysis - Dru Sutton and Stuart Webb, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 48(2) ↩
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Language speed versus efficiency: Is faster better? - ScienceDaily, reporting Pellegrino, Coupé and Marsico, Language 87, 2011 ↩
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Club de Cuervos, a Netflix Original Series From Mexican Filmmaker Gaz Alazraki, to Debut in All Netflix Territories on August 7 - Netflix ↩
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Nosotros los Nobles becomes the top grossing Mexican film in history - Cinema Tropical ↩
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Alfonso Cuarón breaks down the use of language in Roma, including plans for subtitles in Mixtec - Remezcla ↩
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Captioned video for L2 listening and vocabulary learning: A meta-analysis - Maribel Montero Perez, Wim Van Den Noortgate and Piet Desmet, System 41(3), 2013 ↩
Test yourself
Tap an answer.
Vas a ver una serie mexicana para practicar. ¿Cómo le pones los subtítulos?
Apenas llevas unos meses de español. ¿Con cuál empiezas?
¿Por qué el español se siente más rápido que el inglés?
En Nosotros los Nobles se burlan de los ricos y de los que quieren aparentar. ¿Qué par de palabras vas a oír?
Ya entiendes casi todo de una serie sin esforzarte. ¿Qué haces?
